Complete analysis is clouded, however, with a huge one-third of internet time being left vague, called Other. My guess, based on many other surveys, is that Other will include a lot of youth-oriented sites like YouTube, iTunes, Vevo etc. And that’s where the real importance lies!

The new premium music video and entertainment service created in partnership by Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and Abu Dhabi Media Company is already in trouble. VEVO managed just 35 million visits in December, a remarkably low number given the hype and marketing muscle of the corporates behind it.

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This is – or should be – a huge reality check for the music industry. The closing of Tower Records reflected the end of the old-school analog days, and the demise of imeem underlined the folly of trying to use old-style business practices online. Even with VEVO being run on the YouTube platform and picking up a large potential audience, the figures are dismal.

The “Most Popular” music videos on VEVO also showed the problems of the service: Beyonce, Justin Bieber, Drake, Lady Gaga, Jay Sean, Shakira, Britney Spears and Taylor Swift. Those artists will be popular anywhere BUT the problem is the inclusion on VEVO will just steal listeners/viewers away from other platforms.

Claiming “Music Evolution Revolution!” is just not backed up by the figures. The real Evolution and Revolution in music is happening elsewhere. For example, podcasts by trance DJs Above & Beyond already have 21 million listeners/viewers each week. In other words the immediate future of digital music is still iTunes and iPod, much to the concern of the majors.

Will VEVO bring us anything new? No. It is just a continuation of the old-school music cartels trying to channel our music appreciation – and it won’t work any more. Therefore we won’t spend new money via their platform. The real evolution of music marketing online will continue elsewhere – platforms like Pandora, Last.FM, MySpace and WordPress.

The ongoing attempts of social media marketeers to hype themselves may be failing. The much-discussed Top 50 Social Brands is no such thing. Yes, Social Radar may have done all the right things in terms of gathering information, but the results are disastrous.

First of all, the numbers. As the chart below clearly shows, only the Top 10 have any real significance. Thereafter everything is squabbling over half percentage points. Being below No.15 and being below 16% “score” of the leader is irrelevant.

Excerpt from Top 50 Social Brands

The next issue concerns the Top 3 – they are enablers. The product or service of Twitter is not social media – only 4% of tweets are retweets, therefore tweets are an online soapbox. Tweets are a public version of a text message – 96% are ephemeral and inconsequential.

Google is also not social media. Google gathers information about web content, whatever and wherever. There is no social structure or filtering and therefore no social media benefit. Providing a list of 33,900,000 results of a search for “social media” is meaningless.

Facebook is an extensive federation of private clubs, each discussing their own introspective interests. Millions of people have joined Facebook, but millions of people have also joined large denomination churches. To say one is social media and the other not is to reveal the fallacy behind the way statistics are being filtered.

Excerpt from Virtue 100 Top Social Brands

There are some very interesting and relevant results in the surveys, however. And they’re all from the same supplier:

iPhone

Mac

Apple

iTunes

iPod

For any one brand to receive multiple entries in the Top 10 lists of social media from a variety of sources is of enormous importance. Apple have dominated every sector of business they enter in terms of quality. They have consistently been the Rolls Royce of computer companies, but iTunes revolutionised digital music and went on to become the leading retailer.

The iPhone revolutionised mobile phones, bringing the Macintosh quality, ease of use and market-leading features to set levels well above those previously achieved. Similarly the iPod set new standards of quality and profitability for portable digital music players.

BUT and this really is a big BUT, which other brands appear on both lists in the Top 15?

None? So we’ve said a score below 16% of the leader is irrelevant. We’ve said the Top 3 of the Social Radar list are not “true” social brands, which seems to be supported by Virtue who say: “The Vitrue 100 is measuring companies that are using social technology, not those who are the technology.”

We would argue that YouTube should be included in the Virtue results as it provides actual product and its service is public and definitely one of the best examples of social media.

In short, then, there are only two TOP social brands – Apple and YouTube. Let’s see what 2010 and the rest of the twenty-tens reveal.

The web is still going through enormous change but 5-minute-fame has been one massive effect of Web 2.0 and the various social media sites.

Although reality tv started a lot of the throw-them-into-the-spotlight-and-see-what-happens nonsense, modern web technologies have allowed the very obsessed to continue the exposure/drama/fandom to almost unlimited degrees.

Whether ardent fans pushing their obsessions or ardent wannabes pushing themselves, the opportunities are almost endless: website, blog, FaceBook, MySpace, YouTube and Twitter can all be used, alone or in any combination.

Brittany Flickinger(photo) has used a number of methods to keep her hopes and potential-career in the spotlight. After winning season one of Paris Hilton‘s Best Friend Forever tv show, Britt Flick (as she is often known) is still nibbling at the edges of modelling and/or musician and/or merchandiser.

It has been reported that Hilton didn’t stay friends with Brittany because, “I loved her and I trusted her, but sometimes people get too caught up and they change.”

Anyone who has watched the BFF shows will know that Paris is constantly changing her own mind. Nothing wrong with that as she has a multi-million dollar business to run. So although Britt is not in that league yet, she is a very good example of a modern Web 2.0 user in the better senses of the term.

At the start of 2007, MySpace, Google and YouTube were close to level-pegging for worldwide web traffic. FaceBook was barely on the radar.

One year later, YouTube was running at twice the traffic, while FaceBook had caught up with the other two.

At the start of 2009, FaceBook has caught YouTube, while MySpace is close to declining. The success of YouTube started with a lot of fairly juvenile and fun content, but now it exceeds MySpace for great music content, and good film resources, and, well, the whole of life – almost.

YouTube probably has the market locked tight for genre and niche content – all readily available, easy to find, and with good stepping stones to similar items. FaceBook, on the other hand, has captured both the tweenies market – great networking and mesmerising apps – and the family networking crown.

Prediction for the next 12 months: Blogs will catch up with MySpace, especially if FaceBook ever work out how to get a Blogroll to work properly.
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